How Does Customer Success Technology Impact Your Organization?

Humans like to do what humans are good at. Delegating tedious and repetitive tasks to machines means a happier and more focused team. Standardized and automated processes take some design and implementation time, but once they’re launched, CSMs can sit back, watch it run, and adjust when needed. This means their brains are more dedicated to human activities: engagement, intuition, value-added, or relationship building. Overall, these are more gratifying, exciting, and engaging types of work.

Your Customer Success Managers Do a Better Job

Machines aren’t just “able” to do these repetitive and standardized tasks, they’re also very good at it. Your Customer Success team gains in productivity when they are able to rely on strong automated processes. More help from the bots means more dedicated time for proactive planning and coaching. Technology allows CSMs to do what they like, but also what they are good at.

Your Customers Make Sense

Customer-centricity does not mean knowing your customer, it means understanding your customer. It’s silly, but it’s true - it’s not about knowing your customer is unhealthy and reacting, it’s about understanding why, and adjusting your processes accordingly. Without a Customer Success technology, you can guess why your customers are one way or another, but that can only give you an elusive, qualitative, and limited image of who they are, and why. You should always be able to go to both extremes: identifying trends and grouping customers, or looking at granular data to understand your individual users. This allows you to adapt your processes from Marketing targeting or Sales qualification to Onboarding and Renewal.

Your Customer Engagements Become Hyper-Targeted

At the basic level, it’s all about doing the right thing exactly at the right time. You want to be able to answer your customer’s questions before they even arise, and you don’t want to overwhelm them with useless, poorly-timed engagements. This is crucial, users now expect the most valuable and relevant information to be delivered to them exactly when they need it. The same engagement can go from useless to life-changing if it’s delivered to the right person at the right time.

You Gain Visibility Into Your Broader Customer Journey

Your customer exists through many different systems, and you need to meet them where they are headed. In order to provide a powerful omnichannel user experience, you need to consider the customer journey from their first interaction as a prospect, to the day they become your advocate. This means that all of your systems cannot live independently from one another: marketing automation, CRM, billing, or email - they’re all valuable to your Customer Success team.

You Can Upsell Without Sounding Like a Salesperson

Building on the idea of hyper-targeted and timely engagements: identifying an opportunity when it arises is critical to a strong customer experience. If you feel like you’re betraying your customers’ trust by trying to sell them additional packages, it probably means you’re too early or too late. Your raison d’etre is to help your customers achieve success, and by doing that, you develop high-potential customers. By delivering value to those high-potential customers, you help them reach that critical point at which it makes sense to upsell because more features or seats means new success opportunities for the both of you. That upsell opportunity should be based on data, rather than intuition, and technology helps you do just that.

Churn Drops

Do we need to go over this? A Customer Success platform lets you dynamically set priorities and focus on working with the biggest upside. It lets you implement automation to manage issues early. A customer Success platform drives high-value engagement with a customer to become a trusted advisor, rather than being a crisis manager. It reduces churn by identifying unhealthy customers before they start to reevaluate their commitment. In short: Customer Success technology is -very- good at churn mitigation.

About the Author

Mathilde is a Digital Marketing Analyst at Amity. After moving from France to complete a degree in Political Science from McGill University, she decided to settle in Toronto in order to pursue her passion for Marketing and Tech.